Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Let’s start. Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for money. We thank you for civil government. And we thank you, Father, for the economics of families and of our lives. We thank you that every day we’re involved in these economic transactions. And we thank you that your scriptures give us wisdom in terms of how to live our lives economically and both in our families and individually as well. Help us now to think through some of the complicating issues that our current civil government has given us.

In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.

Okay. So what I want to talk about today. Living in exile first of all—and again, like I said yesterday, if you were at the courtship talk—got to be sort of careful with that theme from Jeremiah 29:4-7, because ultimately, you know, that theme of restoration from exile happens at the coming of Christ. And so we never go back to exile like that again. Having said that, there are periods in history where it seems like we’re more like that period of time, and it’s a period of time that can help us to understand how to get through our lives when we have times when we’re living in Babylon—where we’re increasingly in the context of a nation that’s post-Christian and maybe even not Christian at all anymore. As we move into that kind of culture, then the Babylonian experience of the exiles can be of assistance to us to know how we interact with all of that. So that’s kind of where I sort of see, from one perspective, what’s happening in our nation.

And so I want to talk about two things specifically. We’ve had a recent excommunication at Reformation Covenant Church dealing with these matters—not really with these ideas or perspectives on these ideas, but because of the way the speech about these ideas was handled.

So the question is: can we use currency? To many of you young people, that’s all you’ve ever known—Federal Reserve notes with no backing. When I was in high school, even we were still on a silver standard. We still had silver half dollars. There was still some memory and actually practice of having some kind of metallic backing for our currency. And of course, for the last forty years, that has not been the case. We’re in uncharted waters, so to speak.

So the question is: what do we do about that? Is it a sin to be part of a banking system that creates these dollars out of nothing? Does that make us sinners to use Federal Reserve notes?

And then the second issue is: what do we do with benefits of the civil state that we don’t think they properly should be providing? If you think the civil state is primarily for the punishment of evildoers and all of a sudden they’re giving you social security, food stamps, welfare, medical insurance for your kids, CHIP, all this stuff—is it okay to take those benefits or not? Is it okay to take unemployment insurance when it really is no longer, you know, a normal insurance program where the benefits are provided for strictly by the contributions? We know that the stimulus package had money, at least temporary funding for unemployment. So can you take that sort of stuff, or is that a criminal action?

So those are the two kind of issues that are the focal point of some of the things that are being discussed—not generally at our church, but in a subset of the population of our church and maybe at a subset of the population of some of your churches.

So first I want to say make some opening comments about money, and then what I’ve got here is fourteen questions from the man we excommunicated. And these questions are good questions, and the topics are good things to talk about, and there’s nothing wrong with talking about them. This particular person was of the opinion that if you took benefits from the civil state, you were both a sinner and a criminal. And if you didn’t tithe in something that had creational backing to it, it’s idolatry.

So now we’ve gone way over here in terms of accusation of people relative to things that are not clear to the church today. But still, the ideas that are raised by this fellow are good ones to talk about in terms of what’s happening.

So first, a little bit about money. And, you know, I’m a pastor. I understand a little bit. I used to be a purchasing manager. I had educational instruction in economics and stuff. I had to do that to get my purchasing manager certificate, which I did. I was a certified purchasing manager. I know a little bit about it, but I’m not any kind of expert. But as I understand it, one way to think about what’s happened with our currency is that there’s two things that currency can do.

One thing a currency can do is give you a means of transaction. So it’s something that I can hand you and you can give me a good and service in exchange for that transaction, rather than straight barter. I can use a representation of something of value somewhere else to give to you for that transaction.

So first, currency is a means of transaction. Secondly, currency has been used in the past as a store of value. Okay? So if you’ve got a gold coin, there’s value to that coin in and of itself. So a gold coin used to serve as a means of transaction. I can give you a coin and you can give me something in exchange for what I’m buying. But it also meant it was a direct store of value that also was part of the transaction.

What the United States government and most national governments across the world today have done is they’ve separated those two components. And what your Federal Reserve note is—or what your dollar or your euro or your zloty or whatever it is in whatever country you’re in—for the most part, that is now strictly a means of exchange, and it’s no longer a store of value. They don’t want you to think about dollars as having value. They just want you to think of them as a means of transaction.

Now, that’s one reason why there is planned inflation in our economic system. The Federal Reserve system plans for two to three percent inflation. Why? So that the dollar will be worth a little bit less every year and you won’t be tempted to hang on to them, put them under your mattress. They don’t want you doing that because the dollar is like the spice in Dune. It must flow. The dollar has to flow for things to prosper. It’s a means of transaction. And once you stop that, we saw what happened at the end of last year. One of the big problems that the economic difficulties we went through was that people stopped moving money around. They started hoarding money. Well, money is not a store of value. They don’t want you to look at it that way. So they’re going to make it a little bit less every year.

That doesn’t mean they’re stealing anything. They’re just saying, “Look, the only thing this is for is to come into transactions. It’s not really a store of value.”

Now, what that means to us in terms of our families for the next, you know, until all this turns around—a hundred years, two hundred, whatever it is—we have to understand that it’s a simple concept. They’ll tell it to you straight up. But somehow we don’t get it because we’re not instructed in that.

You cannot count on dollars being a store of value. The system will inevitably erode their value. That doesn’t mean they’re useless. They work great for the kind of economic transactions we have, right? It’s really speedy. And when you turn them into blips on a computer screen, now I can buy stuff from Amazon and get it here in two days. And you know, as a means of transaction, the kind the current currency system we have is quite quick and good and useful—but it’s no longer a store of value.

Don’t hoard dollars. You have to put dollars to work in something, right? You have to make them productive. And whether that’s good, bad, or indifferent, I’m not saying that’s a good way to do it. I think there are benefits to it in terms of worldwide transactions. There’s also downsides. And that’s not the point I’m trying to make. But the point I’m trying to make is help you understand what it is so that you won’t be tempted to think that dollars are what you want to save your money in. They’re not. They’re going to inevitably decline in value through planned inflation.

I wanted to make one other point about dollars before I get to these questions. One of the big things that’s going on in the scriptures is transformation and new creation. Everything has to be rethought this side of the cross, the death and resurrection of Christ, and the new creation beginning. Everything changes. Man matures. He comes of age. And I don’t know this to be the case, but it could be that what we’re in the midst of—the very beginning of the birth pangs of this economic system—is coming up. An economic system that is not tied to the creation, to the elementary things of the created order.

Man is subject to angels, subject to the created powers after the fall or before Christ comes. But after Christ comes, now we take dominion over everything. We’re ruling angels now. So it could be—I don’t know—but it’s a notion that is worth thinking about: that the new system of economic transactions may actually have a glimmer of good in them, because it attempts to make the method of currency exchange something that’s a reflection of the productivity of the country, not how many dollars or how many ounces of gold you hold.

What the Fed tries to do is say, well, you’ve got X amount of productivity going on, and if productivity increases, we’ve got to increase the money supply, because the money supply is a reflection of how much productivity is going into the workplace. Okay. Well, that may have good there’s something that might be good about that, because it seems like, you know, we can exercise new ways of looking at things as Christians in the long term that may be better than old elemental ways.

Another factor to remember here is the Enoch factor in the Old Testament—not the good Enoch, the bad Enoch. The bad line, the Cain line, gets to things that are good in and of themselves first, right? They develop musical instruments, metallurgy, and cities—comes in the ungodly line. Ungodly people tend to get to some developments first. Just because it’s started by an ungodly person doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Eventually, we have the city of God in Jerusalem. We’ve got those musical instruments and metallurgy and stuff being used in the temple itself in worship. Now, it’s a genetic fallacy in logic to think that because this stuff was developed by the pagans, we can’t use it. No, that’s not true. And God frequently, for whatever reason, does have the ungodly get to things first.

So even if we have really evil, wicked men running the United States economy—and I don’t know that’s the case, and I don’t know why we should assume it—but let’s assume it for a moment. Even if that’s true, and if they are manipulating this kind of currency we have now for their own value or for whatever conspiratorial theory they have, it doesn’t mean that system is necessarily wrong. It’s too simplistic to say that.

As Christians, we have to be a little more mature in how we evaluate this stuff. Okay.

So now I want to go to these questions. Any questions or comments first about my introductory comments about Babylonian currency and family economics? You know how this applies to family camp is that you have to run your household right. Economics comes from two words: oikos and nomos—household law—and that’s all it is. Everybody’s involved in economics if you manage a household, and you’ve got to know how to run your household finances. And you know, simply put, you’ve got to stay out of debt, spend less than you earn.

But you have to understand too that as you store for the future, you can’t use dollars. And the other thing you’ve got to know at your household is: can you receive benefits? Those are the two big deals. How do you work with the current economic system in terms of dollars? And then what do you do in terms of benefits the civil state may offer to you? Those are my two topics.

Okay. Any questions or comments about the money thing first?

Yes. One thing that comes to mind is often people intentionally store their money in currency, you know, such as buying a US government bond or your money.

Yeah. Yes. I think—yeah, that’s right. There is a kind of a—and there’s a sense in which different nations’ currencies are sort of traded as commodities, right? So that’s kind of related to that. I think—well, there is a mechanism for storing your dollars if you want to long term, but you need to do it in such a way that you’re earning interest, which offsets inflation.

Exactly. That’s exactly right. Yeah, and of course we don’t like burying money to store value, right? Jesus says that’s the ungodly, the bad steward. We’re supposed to not put our money in a hole in the ground. We’re supposed to invest it in things that are productive for the cause of the world.

Hand here, yeah. What do we do with the chunk of money [regarding] inflation?

Uh-huh. Well, the church. Yeah. Yeah. But then you have to ask what? Well, yeah, that’s true. What do you do about the widows? But on the other hand, most widows, most retirement accounts, most 401ks, all that stuff is people are attempting to use it to gain enough interest to offset the drop in—the cost of money through inflation, right?

So all she has to do—if she wants to maintain value—is to get as good as inflation’s going to give. Right now, of course, we’re in a deflationary period. But yeah, so she has to be a little wise about that money. And yeah, people should help her to do that, and the church and relatives and stuff should step up. And there’s the AP—is a big means of doing that as well—providing information to old people and widowers in terms of how to maintain value when the currency itself will no longer do it.

One of the things that’s happened here locally years only.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s irrelevant. Yeah. I’m not so sure though that in that case we want to blame the government for that. If what you have is an increasing demand on the part of people for a particular good and service—I don’t call that necessarily inflation. That means that thing has actually risen in value. And now since we’ve got property tax, then she’s taxed at a higher value. And so it’s the property tax that’s the problem there.

Yeah. I think property tax is just plain wrong. Any other quick ones? I should get to some of these questions. I promised I would.

Okay. Okay. Quickly. Say that again. Are you saying that inflation is not a problem? I’m saying that if you have a system of currency exchange that tries to build in a minimum amount of inflation, yeah, it’s not necessarily a problem. It’s a beneficial thing if what you’re doing is having a means of exchange that’s not a store of value. It helps you—it keeps you from thinking it is a store of value. That’s the positive purpose of inflation in our particular economic system.

Well, how do you justify that apart from just waiters who make stuff? Okay. Well, you’re jumping way ahead of me, but—well, let’s talk about that for just a minute. A just weight and measure. And I’ve actually got a sermon on this for you that are interested. About six months ago, I preached a sermon on just weights and measures.

Just weights. A weight was saying, “Well, if you’re going to sell me a pound of something, I have a scale here. That means you’re really selling me a pound.” And a measure was, “If you’re going to sell me a bushel, I want to make sure it’s really a bushel.” In its most direct form of application, what that refers to is the standardization of weights and measures in our country, which is quite good. I mean, if you go to a lot of foreign countries, there’s all kinds of, you know, weights and scales that are used. But here, the regulation of the government has given us pretty good just weights and measures.

Now, secondly, what it means is in terms of at a particular point of transaction, at that moment in time, you’re not lying when you give them a dollar for a dollar’s worth of candy or whatever it is, right? Right now, if you fold the dollar bill over and pretend it’s two dollars, you’ve sinned against that truth in transaction law that’s required.

But at that moment in time, you’re really getting a dollar’s worth of something for your dollar. Next year, it’s going to be ninety-eight cents, but everybody knows that. And the only people that don’t know that today are people that aren’t paying attention. The government has gone out of its way to let people know that the currency is going to inflate over time in minor degrees. The Federal Reserve publishes their goals for inflation.

So I think that it doesn’t violate just weights and measures to separate store of value from a means of exchange and then keep your means of exchange as a means of exchange by building a little inflation. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, right? When you remove the currency from something like gold, you make it pretty easy for Machiavellian men or evil men to manipulate it. So I’m not saying it’s a wise system or a foolish system. All I’m saying is I don’t see it as an outright violation of God’s law of weights and measures.

We use pound weights. We really do use, you know, real dollars when we transact business, and at that moment in time, it’s a buck. [That] helps produce a trillion dollars. I wouldn’t. No. Uh-huh. I mean, if you print more dollars, if you double the amount of dollars, if you do a stock split, you know, you’ve increased the amount of something, but it’s unless you’ve done it surreptitiously and are trying to cheat people.

Well, and the fact is you can’t—you—the fact is, the same with this, right? If you double the amount of dollars in circulation today, they’re going to be worth half as much tomorrow. No matter what you call them, it’s—you can call it a dollar or a fred or whatever it is. So no, I don’t think that is necessarily—I think it’s a violation of other things perhaps, and it may not. I think it might be foolish. But I think that if everything’s open and above board and you’re representing this is what this thing is—no, I don’t see it as necessarily a bad thing.

We’ll get to that though. There’s some—I want to get back to these questions. There’s questions in here, if we get to them, about creation of dollars. So let’s do a few of these. I want to get back to the benefit thing first.

So the first question this fellow asked is: Does Daniel’s reception of tuition for the Babylonian language and literature study justify any family today in receiving tax-subsidized tuition for college or vouchers for K-12 or tax credits on a tax return for K-12 through college expenses?

Okay, so we have a Babylonian captive, Daniel. He’s provided education financed by an emperor who has gotten his wealth through stealing it and killing other people. Okay. Will Daniel receive those goods and services in the form of Babylonian education? He did.

Now, Daniel knew where to draw the line. Later on in Daniel, if they’re going to force him not to pray, or to bow onto an image, he’s not doing it. Kill me if you want to. So he’s a captive, but just because he’s a captive, he’s not going to do things that are wrong, right? He—we know later in the book—he knows how to draw the line, and he’s willing to die for things that would be sin for him to do.

Daniel is put forth as a righteous guy, and Daniel takes the education. So I think yes, the example of Daniel is an example where it’s okay for Christians to receive benefits from Babylon to help pay for college tuition.

Okay. If that’s what happened with Daniel, then analogously, this person is asking: Well, does that justify families taking tuition tax credits for their kids? And I say yes, because of the example.

Now, the second question he asks is: If so, why doesn’t it justify any family receiving tax-subsidized food, clothes, housing, and transportation? Is it a sin for a family to sign up for CHIP for their kids if they’re indigent and they need help? Is it a sin to take food stamps? I don’t think it is. And I think so because of the very thing this person says: Well, gee, Daniel got fed by them and clothed by them, too. Probably. So that tells us that it may be wrong for a particular family, but it’s not necessarily wrong to receive benefits from Babylon—that Babylon got through sinful means of conquering and killing people. It’s not necessarily wrong, sin, in and of itself, to take government benefits.

Okay. Now, this person then goes on to ask: Now it’s also not necessarily right. It’s like this other thing I was saying. What you want—what does the Bible tell us? The Bible tells us what we can’t do. Right? And sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. It tells us what we can’t do. If we can’t do something, we generally see it as having liberty to do it.

So people need—if you’re going to say it’s sin to take CHIP money, you’re going to have to come to me and prove it from scripture. I don’t have to prove to you why it’s okay for somebody to take it. You’ve got to prove that it’s a violation of the law.

Now, I may, you know, just because it’s not a violation of God’s law, doesn’t make it a wise action. It could be foolish and so sinful in some ways, but not sin in the sense of disobedience of God’s law.

So I think that we don’t need Daniel as a positive example—number one. If you’re going to tell me it’s a sin and a crime to send your kid down to a land grant university, if you’re saying that’s necessarily sin, it’s your job to bring that charge and substantiate it. It’s not the job of the parent to show why it’s okay. Hey, you get that? That’s the way sin and crime works in the scriptures. You’ve got to bring charges against somebody. You’ve got to prove it’s wrong.

We don’t need Daniel’s example. But we’ve got it. We’ve got a specific example of someone who is given to us as a role model in Babylon who is receiving government benefits and who knows what he shouldn’t do and doesn’t do that stuff later on. And this isn’t one of those things. He had no—it was the way he was going to get fed and educated. It was going to be the way. Hey, more than that, he becomes, you know, Nebuchadnezzar’s right-hand guy. He’s like the treasury secretary in Babylon. And we don’t have any record where, in Daniel’s mind, “Wow, now I get to give him a biblical system of just weights and measures.” There’s no record.

Now, we don’t know what he did or didn’t do, but it doesn’t seem to have been at the top of his list of what the priorities are to achieve peace in Babylon. So not only did he receive this stuff—after he got the benefits and training, after he went to, you know, Harvard—he then started working for the administration. Okay? None of that is sin.

So now the next thing this person asks is question three: How is this different from the basic—how is this different from the moral evil of men desiring to have one purse? Proverbs 1. Somebody got their Bible?

Proverbs 1. I don’t know. Oh, mid to halfway through, there are these men that say, “We’re going to have one purse together.” Somebody could find that text real quick and read it to us.

So the question is: Look, if you’re going to say it’s okay to receive government benefits, isn’t the government just like those guys that say we can have one purse? It’s Proverbs 1. What’s the particular verse about one purse?

Verse 12. So maybe start reading about verse eight or nine, I guess. Is that where it starts? Could you read it out loudly, Roger?

Yeah. “My son, hear your father’s instruction, for not your mother’s teaching, for graceful. My son, the sinners entice you, do not consent. They said, ‘Come with us. Let us wait for the flood. Let us ambush the innocent without like shield. Let us swallow them alive and like those who pit. All precious goods shall fill our houses with plunder. Among us we will all have one purse.’”

Okay. So the idea is: How does this verse instruct us about Daniel’s actions in Babylon? You’ve got these plundering empire guys. Daniel receives the benefits, and therefore, this person is saying he’s being enticed by the Proverbs command and then having one purse.

But of course, what’s the difference? Why doesn’t that verse work? Daniel’s not engaging in violence or bloodshed. He’s not out there laying in wait for people, right? Eventually, that may have been where some of the money he got came from. But Proverbs 1 is not describing one little aspect of wicked men. It’s describing a whole system of men enticing righteous men to enter into specific sinful actions of killing people and robbing them.

We don’t see that in Daniel. So in the story of Daniel, there’s a clear distinction between him going ahead and using government benefits when they’re needed for him to survive and to increase his education and service. That is not equatable with the emperor then going out and destroying people. Does that make sense, everybody?

Any questions about those three comments?

I got one. Yeah. I I’ve always—I agree with you, Dennis. But at the same time, when we are given the opportunity to, and we don’t think the government should be doing something, we have a duty and a responsibility to work against that very institution, receiving funds from at the time that we would try to get rid of it if we could.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I thank you for that, Jeff. And that’s what I want—what we’re trying to determine here is: Is it sin? Not: Is it wise or good or beneficial in a particular situation? How are you going to change? That’s the question. And Daniel changed it by working in the context of that system, and eventually what he did was he was part of the process of conversion of Nebuchadnezzar, which we can assume flowed down into all kinds of other changes in the culture.

Gary North back in the early eighties had a little newsletter, and he would answer questions, just bang out the answers. And somebody said, “Well, should I take my social security check, or should I just turn it back to the government?” North said, “Take it. Try to live providently so you’re not dependent upon government benefits as much as you can. And what you can do then is use the checks that you get from social security or whatever it is and use that to donate to organizations that are trying to supplant the social security system.”

So it’s kind of like plundering the Egyptians and using those benefits to go ahead and use it for righteous purposes. We have a tax credit—$100 tax credit in Oregon—for political action. You can either give your hundred bucks to the state of Oregon and fund abortions or homosexual education or whatever it is they’re going to do with it, or you can give that same amount of money dollar for dollar to a political action committee, such as a couple that I’m involved with, that are distinctively Christian, that are trying to eventually end the taxes enough to where we get rid of the tax credit. And that’s a good thing to do.

So just because we’re saying it’s not necessarily sin doesn’t mean we think it’s a good thing. And it’s certainly not a good thing to grow dependent upon the civil state. So you want to try to live providently in a way that gets you away from dependence upon those things. But on the other hand, we don’t want to let people in our congregations bring false guilt against people that, for whatever reason, in their particular circumstance, they think this is what they’ve got to do. They think they’re in a Daniel situation. You know, the elders can work with them. The deacons can help them become, you know, better stewards or whatever they can do.

What are we going to do if Obama is successful? And I’m not sure he will be. But if he does carbon tax, and if he does healthcare, these things are less and less of an option for us to keep away from. If the tax rate becomes fifty, sixty percent of GDP, guess what? Most of the things you’re going to involve yourself in are going to be receiving tax dollars. Is that sinful? I don’t think so.

So these are very practical questions, and they’re questions that, you know, have the capability—if not answered correctly—of bringing legalism: not in the sense of earning your salvation, but in the sense of adding laws to God’s laws. There’s no eleventh commandment against smoking. There’s no eleventh commandment, I don’t think, against tuition tax credits or political action tax credits or using the roads or using the telephone service, even though the federal government’s involved in something that ought to be purely private.

We could go on and on and on. There’s virtually no area of our culture anymore that doesn’t have the hand of civil government in it. We don’t want it there. But what’s our response? Are we going to say it’s sinful to use these things?

Next question on this list: How is it different than the basic Marxist tenet “from each according to his taxpaying ability, to each according to his need”? So that’s the question. What’s the answer?

These are not difficult questions to answer. I don’t think I’ve done any preparation. What would be your answer? Well, gee, if Daniel can do that, and if you’re sitting there at your home, you’ve got your kid off to college, and you took the tuition tax credit money or whatever it is on your income taxes that they give you for your kids’ tuition—how’s that different from what Marx said here?

There’s a couple answers to that. What are they? Nobody. What? Say—oh, well. Number one. Okay, John.

A Christian family living in the Soviet Union in the nineteen seventies had to go to the Soviet Christians they were sitting because they followed one set of God’s commands to provide for their… So no good system is heading in the right direction right now. We have… Yeah, that’s good. You know, Rushdoony has written about how it’s one of the worst things you can do is define who you are in opposition to somebody else. That’s one thing is going on here. What if it is exactly the same? Was Marx wrong in everything? Necessarily, is Marx the standard by which we’re going to judge our ethical activity, whether we conform or are in complete opposition to what Marx wrote? What kind of goofy way of thinking is that?

We’re Christians. Okay.

So number one: we don’t judge ourselves in relationship to the standard of Marx. Number two, as John said, even if it is the same, and we don’t like what Marx is doing, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a condemnation of the Marxist drift of our culture politically, but that doesn’t equate down to what we’re doing. Daniel was not, you know, advocating the kind of empire and prideful thing that Nebuchadnezzar had going on by partaking of the system. Clearly, he didn’t.

So even if it, you know, even if it’s a result directly of that system, if you’re in Marxist Russia and they’ve taxed one hundred percent of everything and they’re giving you food back, you’ll take the food for your family, I assume, right?

Right? So number one: we don’t define ourselves in opposition to Marx. Number two, even if it is similar to it, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily sin. And number three, of course, it isn’t the same, right? I mean, we can make analogies. We can make analogies, but then we start believing these analogies are equalities. They’re not.

Obama is becoming more socialist, but he still, you know, we still have a relatively small portion of the gross domestic product of the country that’s overseen directly by the government. Government owns a couple of car companies. Government doesn’t own them all. Government has majority stock in some banks, not them all. This is not Marxism yet. We may be moving that way, but it’s wrong to equate them one for one.

Okay? So, you know, don’t be fooled by this kind of rhetoric. Oh gosh. Yeah. Looks a lot like what we’re saying we can do here—this tenet of Marxism. Don’t be fooled by that kind of stuff. That’s not a good way to dialogue about these things, by arguing from analogy and making equalities, by defining ourselves and what we’re in opposition to, et cetera.

Okay. “If I’m justified in taking legal opportunities to get tax money back for purposes not related to crime and punishment, this is a long question because the government has taken too much from me for unproductive or immoral purposes.”

So okay. So what he’s saying is one of the arguments that I have is that if you receive government benefits, you’re also paying a ton of money in taxes. And so probably if you get a hundred dollar political action tax credit, you’re nowhere near recovering what they stole from you—if you want to use the analogy of theft for the civil government, right? So you’re getting back some of your money.

Same thing with tuition tax credits. You’re pouring thousands of dollars—if you’re a property owner in Oregon—you’re sending them thousands of dollars to educate other people’s kids in public schools, and you get a little bit of that back when you send your kid off to college.

So he’s saying, well, if that’s true, if you know you’re trying to get back some of what you paid in—he says: “Wouldn’t the golden rule require me to refuse this, refuse this gain, which will cause my neighbor also to have too much taken from him? Where is my attitude towards others who are getting benefits from the government at my expense?”

Well, let’s answer the first question. So the golden rule. So if I take this tuition or the political action tax credit, I’m making other people get more money stolen from them. That’s the premise of his comment. Is that true? No, it’s not true.

You know what happens? The government increases taxes through legislative means in Oregon. It takes sixty percent of the House and Senate. In other measures, you can do it through the initiative process. We just had a one point one billion dollar tax increase. We’re probably going to get that referred to the population for a vote. So, you know, if you want to worry about the government taking more money, stealing more money—if you want to use the analogy of theft—from other people, that’s who you attack it at, right?

If you apply for the tax credit or not, it’s not going to change the tax rate. Now, long term it might. You know, Reagan’s view was if you cut taxes enough, eventually the system will shrivel up because they won’t have enough money to fund itself. So his theory was starve the beast. And you know, Obama’s theory is if you spend enough, eventually the people will agree to raising taxes. So you’ve got two different—there is a long-term relationship to the amount of benefits that are consumed and the tax rate, but it’s certainly not direct.

So this particular individual sent me an email and said, “Well, your disciples of the last three years, Matt, Doug, and Michaels, and Eli Evans, and stuff, they signed a petition that said they wanted to steal more of their neighbors’ money for their kids’ education.” Well, it was a tuition tax credit initiative.

So what you’ve done here, in this kind of thinking, is the golden rule. If you had a direct action on not taking some of your neighbors’ money, then this might apply. But you don’t. The government’s going to take x amount of tax dollars. That stuff is legislatively mandated and controlled, and that’s the way it’s going to be.

Now, again, so I don’t think it’s sin or a violation of the golden rule to use the benefits. Might you not want to do it? Maybe if we had, you know, a million Christians in Oregon, all of them that said on a particular day from now on, we’re not taking a particular benefit anymore. Maybe there is some value to that, right? I mean, tactically, a benefits revolution is an okay thing to engage in. But what’s not okay to engage in is to say that I’m going to insist you’re involved in a benefit revolution because you’re stealing from other people when you take a tax benefit. That just doesn’t—there’s that—it is a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow. There’s no logic to that argument. Does that make sense?

Okay. Any questions on that one? “Taking government benefits—are we stealing from our neighbors? Are we receiving stolen goods, and therefore it’s sin and crime for us to receive stolen goods?”

Any question about that? Anybody feeling guilty for… I can’t see your hands, so just I just wanted to ask: do you think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding that when we think about the government as democratic—that is, that’s us—rather than “the government and us”? And when I start saying, “Well, they’re using my money to do this, that, and the other thing,” it’s not my money. It’s their money. They’re responsible for what they do with it. So I’m not stealing from my neighbor. They are. Is there a necessity to make fundamental distinction between me and the government?

Yeah. That’s why I did this workshop so I’d get really good ideas like that one that I hadn’t thought of. That’s right. Right. That’s absolutely right.

James B. Jordan has always said, “There is no government. There’s governors. There’s men making decisions. There’s no kind of amorphous democratic government.” Yeah. I think that’s a great comment. Thank you so much for that. Yeah. And they’re responsible, right?

Good.

Okay. Anyone else? I can’t see your hand, so just shout out if you have a question or comment.

It’s ten thirty. I got through four of fourteen questions. We don’t want to neglect our personal responsibility, so to not take unnecessarily when we have means otherwise. I’m not sure. Well, yeah. See, that’s where I think it’s okay if some people say, “Well, I’m not going to—I am going to turn the social security check back. I’ll just leave it in the system.” That’s okay. But it’s also okay, I think, tactically, if you do a Gary North thing and you say, “Well, I’m living providentially. I’m not going to become dependent upon the civil government as much as possible. But I’m not going to turn down the money they send me either. I’m going to use it to change the civil government.” I think tactically that’s an okay thing to do. That’s a liberty issue.

One example: one thing you learn from Daniel is, Washington has this homeschool thing where they’ll provide all your supplies, all your—

But you’ve got to use that case. Yeah, that is an excellent comment, and it has far-reaching implications because the more we get into, for instance, if you take, if you use CHIP for your kids, well guess what? It’s a government program. They’re going to have sensitivities to how you’re training your child and disciplining them and all that stuff. It’s going to come with implicit strings.

In the case of tuition tax credits for homeschoolers, yeah, there’s explicit strings. You have to use their textbooks, so you can’t use Christian books. We’ve got charter schools here. You can’t use Christian material. And people are lured into it with the benefit, and they’re giving up their commitment to Christian education. That’s really very wrong. And it’s stuff that has to be thought through.

It’s not just a tactic governmentally, as you’re saying. That’s right, Mike. It’s: what is it going to do to our family to have increasing entanglements with a governmental system of bureaucrats? They’re going to want to control more and more of what we do and make it less and less Christian.

Yeah. Excellent point.

Well, that’s all the time we have. Dennis, yes. Suggest people want to know the answer to these questions—they can email you, you know, you distribute something.

Yeah, that’d be a good idea. I’ll try to meet. Yeah, I’ll try to. Yeah, I had no idea when I got through four. Sorry. Longwinded as usual.

I think what we just touched on is really where this battle is, because the attitude I think—the one cliff that you’re pointing out is so legalistic that we’re calling sin. The other cliff is that we start. There’s all this stuff out there. And so as a church, we suddenly start: what are all the government benefits we can get for all of our members? Yeah. I think that can be equally problematic.

Yes. Absolutely. I give you a personal example question. We have a program that is exploding in California that started on a good basis in home healthcare, where instead of putting a person in a common hospital care, that person…

It’s been unionized now, and now it’s expanded, and family members can qualify. So Linda and I probably could get the government to pay us to have Linda’s dad live with us, even though we don’t need any help doing that. But because he’s ninety and he couldn’t live on his own, I’m sure there’s their standard. So we have to be, you know, sensitive to not become so aggressive going after programs that we become part of the problem.

I think that’s often people are trying. Yeah. Yeah. There’s two ditches in the road, and I’ve been trying to address the ditch that’s contemporary with RCC right now, which is this attack on the liberty of Christians to do things in a way that seem to be consistent with what Daniel did. But there’s certainly the other ditch, and we have to be careful of that, too.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Yeah, that’s a good point.

On the other hand, it would be interesting at some point in time to strategically, in a particular city or state, strategically take a year, try to get as much government money as possible, and then use it, as I said, to change the government. Yeah, that okay. Inflation is okay if that’s what they published and that’s what they achieved. That’s not a… What happens if they miss that target?

Well, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Well, yeah. Well, you know, a couple of things there. One: I didn’t mean to say it was okay. What I meant to say was I don’t see it as a violation—a clear violation—of any biblical command. But I think that it’s probably rather foolish, given the lack of financial discipline that people generally have, the government has, et cetera. And I think that and it’s certainly true that they’re not very good at it. I mean, we’re now in a position where they don’t know what to do. We may end up with deflation for a couple years, which would be disastrous, or we could have hyperinflation. Nobody knows.

So absolutely, you know, we’ve got real problems when we try to put men in charge of this stuff. You know, the best of worlds, if you’re going to do something like that, you want men who are humble, who are praying to God all the time, who have people around them that are searching the scriptures out for biblical truth.

Now, we take guys that don’t have humility before God, that aren’t praying, that aren’t seeking out the scriptures, who are filled with pride and hubris over them being, you know, the great manipulator, the great thing over everything. And of course, they’re going to err in rather tragic and severe ways and bring financial difficulties on us.

So yeah, that is a problem. I think generally what the Federal Reserve has done, you know, has a pretty checkered record. It doesn’t seem to meet the targets. It seems to be always over—there’s too much inflation going on. And clearly the Fed pumped way too much money into the system disproportionate to the production of the country over the last year or two, and that produced the great amount of debt and difficulties that we have.

So yeah.

All right, let’s close with prayer. Father, we do thank you for the age in which we live. We know it comes forth from your hand. It’s filled with things that make us scratch our head and try hard to think about big issues that we’re not really comfortable thinking about or knowing quite how to do it. Help us, Lord God, in our churches to avoid those two ditches. One of being censorious in spirit toward people that are trying to do what’s right and best for their family. Help us, Lord God, to rather help people and get them to become more and more provident in their lifestyle, and that the church would take up more and more of the difficulties and shortcomings of financial problems in our families.

Help us to avoid the other ditch as well, of letting ourselves become dependent, seeking the government handout, the way of the world as we now see it. So keep us, Lord God, from that kind of worldliness as well. Help us to chart that middle course of liberty under Christ with wise actions for the future.

In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Amen.